The Schlemiel as Modern Hero PDF Download

Author: Ruth R. Wisse
Publisher:
ISBN: 9780226903125
Category : American fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 134

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Author: Sanford Pinsker
Publisher: SIU Press
ISBN: 9780809315819
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 224

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Book Description
The certainty that deep down we are all schlemiels is perhaps what makes America love an inept ball team or a Woody Allen who unburdens his neurotic heart in public. In this unique, revised history of the schlemiel, Sanford Pinsker uses psychological, linguistic, and anecdotal approaches, as well as his considerable skills as a spritely storyteller, to trace the schlemiel from his beginnings in the Old Testament through his appearance in the nineteenth-century literature of Mendele Mocher Seforim and Sholom Aleichem to his final development as the beautiful loser in the works of Isaac Bashevis Singer, Bernard Malamud, Saul Bellow, Philip Roth, and Woody Allen. Horatio Alger might have once been a good emblem of the American sensibility, but today Woody Allen's anxious, bespectacled punin (face) seems closer, and truer, to our national experience. His urban, end-of-the-century anxieties mirror--albeit in exaggeration--our own. This expanded study of the schlemiel is especially relevant now, when scholarship of Yiddish and American Jewish literature is on the increase. By sketching the family tree of that durable anti-hero the schlemiel, Pinsker proves that Jewish humor is built upon the very foundations of the Jewish experience. Pinsker shows the evolution of the schlemiel from the comic butt of Yiddish jokes to a literary figure that speaks to the heart of our modern problems, and he demonstrates the way that Yiddish humor provides a sorely needed correction, a way of pulling down the vanities we all live by.

Author: Ruth R. Wisse
Publisher: Princeton University Press
ISBN: 0691149461
Category : Humor
Languages : en
Pages : 296

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No detailed description available for "No Joke".

Author: Ruth R. Wisse
Publisher: Wicked Son
ISBN: 1642939714
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 381

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First came parents with the good sense to flee Europe in 1940 and the good fortune to reach the land of freedom. Their daughter, Ruth, grew up in the shadow of genocide—but in tandem with the birth of Israel, which remained her lodestar. She learned that although Jewishness is biologically transmitted, democracy is not, and both require intensive, intelligent transmission through education in each and every generation. They need adults with the confidence to teach their importance. Ruth tried to take on that challenge as dangers to freedom mounted and shifted sides on the political spectrum. At the high point of her teaching at Harvard University, she witnessed the unraveling of standards of honesty and truth until the academy she left was no longer the one she had entered.

Author: Philip Hollander
Publisher: Indiana University Press
ISBN: 0253042097
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 272

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In From Schlemiel to Sabra Philip Hollander examines how masculine ideals and images of the New Hebrew man shaped the Israeli state. In this innovative book, Hollander uncovers the complex relationship that Jews had with masculinity, interrogating narratives depicting masculinity in the new state as a transition from weak, feminized schlemiels to robust, muscular, and rugged Israelis. Turning to key literary texts by S. Y. Agnon, Y. H. Brenner, L. A. Arieli, and Aharon Reuveni, Hollander reveals how gender and sexuality were intertwined to promote a specific Zionist political agenda. A Zionist masculinity grounded in military prowess could not only protect the new state but also ensure its procreative needs and future. Self-awareness, physical power, fierce loyalty to the state and devotion to the land, humility, and nurture of the young were essential qualities that needed to be cultivated in migrants to the state. By turning to the early literature of Zionist Palestine, Hollander shows how Jews strove to construct a better Jewish future.

Author: Ruth R. Wisse
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 9780226903187
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 420

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What makes a great Jewish book? In fact, what makes a book "Jewish" in the first place? Ruth R. Wisse eloquently fields these questions in The Modern Jewish Canon, her compassionate, insightful guide to the finest Jewish literature of the twentieth century. From Isaac Babel to Isaac Bashevis Singer, Elie Wiesel to Cynthia Ozick, Wisse's The Modern Jewish Canon is a book that every student of Jewish literature, and every reader of great fiction, will enjoy.

Author:
Publisher: BRILL
ISBN: 900443528X
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 293

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Book Description
Places and Forms of Encounter in Jewish Literatures. Transfer, Mediality and Situativity brings together contributions on Jewish literatures with methodologies and theories discussed in Comparative and World Literature Studies. The contributions highlight dynamic literary processes in various historical and cultural contexts.

Author: Philip Hollander
Publisher: Indiana University Press
ISBN: 0253042070
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 249

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Book Description
“Convincingly demonstrates the role of gender and sexuality in forming the Israeli state and . . . the place of literature as a force in politics.” —Choice In From Schlemiel to Sabra, Philip Hollander examines how masculine ideals and images of the New Hebrew man shaped the Israeli state. In this innovative book, Hollander uncovers the complex relationship that Jews had with masculinity, interrogating narratives depicting masculinity in the new state as a transition from weak, feminized schlemiels to robust, muscular, and rugged Israelis. Turning to key literary texts by S.Y. Agnon, Y.H. Brenner, L.A. Arieli, and Aharon Reuveni, Hollander reveals how gender and sexuality were intertwined to promote a specific Zionist political agenda. A Zionist masculinity grounded in military prowess could not only protect the new state but also ensure its procreative needs and future. Self-awareness, physical power, fierce loyalty to the state and devotion to the land, humility, and nurture of the young were essential qualities that needed to be cultivated in migrants to the state. By turning to the early literature of Zionist Palestine, Hollander shows how Jews strove to construct a better Jewish future.

Author: Isaac Bashevis Singer
Publisher: Macmillan
ISBN: 0374530254
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 229

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Book Description
Twelve short stories about Jewish life in Poland.

Author: Bruce Jay Friedman
Publisher: Open Road + Grove/Atlantic
ISBN: 0802197426
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 317

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Book Description
The New York Times–bestselling author finds the pulse of the aging American male in two ingeniously funny novels. “I just laughed myself sick” (Neil Simon). Two classic works of comic self-help fiction by “one of the funniest writers in America” available together for the first time in a single ebook edition (John Gregory Dunne). With its “sparkling . . . winsome and true” look at the single male in America—from his sad new apartment furnishings to his career struggles to the mystifying dating world—Bruce Jay Friedman’s The Lonely Guy’s Book of Life was as cringingly relatable to both men and women when it was first published in 1978 as is today (The New York Times Book Review). The inspiration for Steve Martin’s classic cult film comedy, The Lonely Guy, it was hailed as “the funniest book of this year, or most any other. You don’t close this book. You just start reading it again immediately. I loved every page–and laughed out loud on most of them” (Dan Jenkins, author of Semi-Tough and Dead Solid Perfect). Twenty years later, Friedman returned to the subject with The Slightly Older Guy, finding his quarry no longer alone, maybe a little less lonely, not so young anymore, faltering at fashion, pondering a new career, but just as resiliently witty. Featuring a new afterword, The Considerably Older Guy offers advice on such topics as divorce, grandchildren, exercise, diet, and insomnia. “If you believe in reading, then when a book comes along by Friedman, you have to read it. It’s as simple as that” (The Washington Post Book World).